Welcome to Pranav Sanghavi who comes to us as a postdoctoral associate from Western Virginia University. He is working with Laura Newburgh in Wright Lab in the areas of Astrophysics & Cosmology. Pranav is interested in radio astronomy instrumentation to probe into cosmology and astrophysical phenomena such as fast radio bursts. He aims to build and deeply understand instruments and cleverly analyse their data to detect even the most elusive astrophysical and cosmological signals.
Pranav earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from West Virginia University. His doctoral work focused on localizing Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) using Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). He built and commissioned an interferometric array at Green Bank Observatory as a VLBI outrigger station for the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) FRB project. He has also helped run the “Research Experience for Teachers - Digital Signal Processing in Radio Astronomy” (RET-DSPIRA) program since the summer of 2017. This program helps bring radio astronomy and digital signal processing to high school classrooms by enabling teachers to build radio telescopes and relevant infrastructure from scratch.
With Dr. Laura Newburgh at Yale, he will leverage his instrumentation and radio interferometry background to analyze and hopefully detect the elusive neutral hydrogen 21cm signal gleaned from the CHIME cosmology data. Additionally he will moonlight to further his doctoral work in VLBI localizations of fast radio bursts with the CHIME/FRB outriggers.
Before WVU, he completed his B.Tech. in Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering at Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, India, and completed a visiting studentship focused on radio astronomy research at Raman Research Institute in Bangalore, India. He enjoys making music and art in my copious free time. Pranav is an avid home cook who occasionally cooked specials as a guest chef at a local restaurant for fun during his Ph.D. years.